MUSEYON BOOKS Smart City Guides for Travel, History, Art and Film Lovers

Food, Art and Literature in France
By John Baxter
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  Amélie, the bucolic and whimsical French film by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was made nine years and yet continues to hold a special place in the heart of romantics and Francophiles alike.   Many of the scenes from the film were shot on the streets of Paris though a fair amount of the interiors are from a studio in Cologne. ... Read More »

This time, south of Paris in Marseille. A Picasso and various other works were stolen from the home of a collector Friday evening in a robbery that wasn’t quite as clever as the Paris heist. The thieves beat the owner of the works in order to make off with the masterpieces.   The Picasso stolen was a lithograph representing a ... Read More »

Early this morning at the Paris Modern Art Museum, one brazen thief stole five paintings right off the wall. The works include ‘Le pigeon aux petits-pois” (The Pigeon with the Peas) an ochre and brown Cubist oil painting by Pablo Picasso, valued an estimated €23 million, “La Pastorale” (Pastoral), an oil painting of nudes on a hillside by Henri Matisse ... Read More »

  At London’s Barbican, zebra finches play guitar for the pleasure of museum goers—play “Freebird”, dudes! (Guardian UK)   Only 33 years after its last use, France has opened a museum dedicated to their favorite method of capital punishment, the guillotine. (Guardian)   If you’re liable to blush or giggle at the sight of giant wooden weewees and whowhodillys, you ... Read More »

  Don’t jump, Mr. Statue! You have so much to be inanimate for! (Gothamist)   One of the world’s most famous insomniacs, Vincent Van Gogh used to sleep on a pillow covered in camphor, which did terrible things for his health and psyche, but must have made for interesting dreams. (The Week)   Kenneth Anger is still out there making ... Read More »

  Last season, before his sad and untimely suicide in February at the age of 40, designer Alexander McQueen offered fans an exhaustive, exhilarating SciFi vision of fashion—an outrageous, masterful collection of organic-inspired prints and alien shapes that looked to both the natural sciences and humanity’s future. Materials recalled butterfly wings and spaceships as the mix of natural and technological ... Read More »

  Long the king of Manhattan-based comedy movies, Woody Allen returned to his native island for last year’s “Whatever Works” after a five-film, five-year stand shooting films in England and Spain. Alas few of the New Yorkers who usually turn out for the Brooklyn-born director’s real-estate-porn and upper-class-ennui smirkfests bought tickets to the critically panned “Whatever Works”, leaving it with ... Read More »